I never understand the hiring requirement of a degree for a startup - that is a silly way to hold your company back. The best coders and designers I have worked with have either had no degree or have an irrelevant degree. Skilled people with sharp minds will train themselves to do the things that interest them.
I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.
I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.
300 resumes arrive in your inbox and you need to narrow those down to a few, since you don't want to spend all your time interviewing. Are you more likely to prefer the ones who have been vetted already? Probably.
